The world slowly and steadily heats up and threatens our extinction. But look! A squirrel! Or an emu cuddling up to a baby deer! How cute!
Distractions are everywhere, welcome or unwelcome, flooding nonstop into our social media feeds and email inboxes with barely a moment’s pause.
In the modern media, bush fires break out constantly in politics, business, culture, sport usually as part of some form of culture war where absolutely nothing is ever settled. Instead, we just see one story after another briefly claiming the limelight then disappearing shortly afterwards to be replaced instantly by its successor. Welcome to the world of the PR and comms professional.
Amid the frenzy, where does this leave us? How on earth, as comms professionals, do we get to tell complicated or nuanced stories that in some cases may take years to play out?
And how can we expect journalists to pay attention to nuanced and long-running stories when there’s a bin fire to write about that is immediate, seemingly of more interest to the public and certainly of more interest to Facebook’s algorithms in search of clickbait? It’s quite a challenge.
The first thing to admit is that there are no easy answers to this, but the question remains worth asking.
Where we are today is the legacy birthed by the internet, then topped up by Facebook, and finally turbocharged by Twitter and Tik Tok. What is the collective noun for a group of superficial, fleeting and ultimately unimportant articles? Let’s go with a distraction of stories.
Or as Shakespeare’s Macbeth might have likened it, a story that ‘struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.’
Today’s ‘scoops’ leave little time for proper fact checking in the rush to publish, and the call for instant reactions on social media leave no time for readers to properly gather their thoughts and process the stories. It’s exhausting, isn’t it?
But all the challenges aside, how do we create narratives that need time to play out?
The first and most obvious answer is to not rely so heavily on traditional media. This means businesses or organisations have to be much more interested in the process of telling their own stories via their websites and social media channels.
This means they must have their own proper editorial processes, like story sequencing, and know how to create longer running narratives. It also requires companies or organisations to invest properly in commissioning good journalistic writing, supported by decent graphics, photography and video that all add up to attractive content.
Next, and I’ll be blunt here, it also means rejecting the ‘it’ll do’ approach to filling Twitter and Facebook feeds with vapid corporate pap of little interest to anyone, despite glossy production values. The reality it is that no-one is interested in it other than the saps paid to produce it.
So that’s route one covered.
The second route to creating long running narratives is a return to the traditional PR, now sadly falling into disuse. This relies on persuading a journalist to sit down with your firm or organisation for a proper background briefing where you lay out the narrative journey supported by milestones you’ve mapped out along the way to show that you are making progress.
But, post briefing, whenever milestones are met, please don’t rely on the journalist remembering where your organisation is at any particular point in terms of your overarching narrative.
You’ll have to be ready to bring them up to speed with progress made and remind them what is going to happen next. Meanwhile, keep journalists in the loop via interactions on social media and email and hopefully they will read at least some of your content.
These two approaches combined go a long way to telling long running stories, but if anyone reading this has other or better ideas, we’d love to hear them.
By Neil Boom, a consultant at Paternoster Communications